In recent years, great advancement has been realized in ink jet printing technologies. These printing techniques have the advantages of easy image manipulation, compatibility with digital image files, and potential faster turn-around time. When configured properly, ink jet printers can deliver images with qualities close to that of the traditional photographs. For digital photo printing in a minilab, printing productivity is crucial because a large number of photo images often need to be printed in a short period of time in a minilab. To use ink jet printers in such applications, it is desirable to have to a wide ink jet print head that can print a large number of image pixels on a receiver in one printing pass. The print head is preferably page-wide so that a photo image can be printed in a single pass.
Borderless print is a very desirable feature to photographic viewers. Borderless print refers to photographic images that are printed from edge to edge on a receiver. To provide borderless print by an ink jet printer, it is critical for the array of ink nozzles in the print head to be perfectly aligned with the edge of the ink receivers. Any skew in the receiver relative to the print head will result in oblique image borders at the edges of the receiver. The image defects thus produced include unprinted wedge margins and over printing out side of the receiver.
Another requirement in photo minilab is the capability of printing photographs at both different resolutions. This capability is needed because photographs are often viewed at different viewing distances. High image quality needs to be perceived for all applications. For example, a wallet-size (2" by 3") photograph needs to be printed at a higher resolution than that of an enlarged page-size (8" by 10") photograph because a wallet-size photograph is normally viewed at a closer distance than a page-size photograph.